Washington, DC - Members of the Project 21 black leadership network are speaking out about President Barack Obama's nomination of Solicitor General Elena Kagan to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Mychal Massie: "After all of the division he has foisted upon America in his short tenure, Obama had a perfect opportunity to show he could be conciliatory and moderate. With the nomination of Elena Kagan to the U.S. Supreme Court, Obama failed miserably. Obama condemned his nominee, his colleagues in Congress and himself to a long, hot and bitter summer in which the full radicalism of his agenda will be on full display. Obama is rapidly running out of opportunities to convince the American people that his presidential campaign was not simply a collection of hot air and empty promises." (Mychal Massie is chairman of Project 21, a syndicated columnist whose work appears at WorldNetDaily, and a former talk show host and businessman.)

Horace Cooper: "Observers say Kagan is meant to be an 'intellectual counterweight' to Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Scalia. Intellectual counterweight? She'd be better described as marginal and outside the mainstream. In the signature case she led as dean of Harvard's law school — preventing military recruiters on her campus — she not only lost, but she lost big. Not one justice took her side. Is Kagan truly the best candidate Obama could find, or the one most palatable to his far-left base?" (Horace Cooper, a member of Project 21 and an adjunct fellow with the National Center for Public Policy Research, is a former visiting professor at the George Mason University School of Law.)

R. Dozier Gray: "As painful as it is for me to accept his choice, President Obama does have the constitutional right to nominate whomever he wants to the Supreme Court. And, with this Senate, he has a reasonable expectation that Elena Kagan will be confirmed. But he should not consider it a certainty. Obama and Harry Reid should not try to game the process as we've seen tried so often in this Congress. Obama voted against Samuel Alito when he was in the Senate, so he should naturally be willing to afford each senator that same privilege of advice and consent he once enjoyed." (R. Dozier Gray is a member of the national advisory council for the Project 21 black leadership network and a combat veteran.)

Project 21, a leading voice of black conservatives since 1992, is sponsored by The National Center for Public Policy Research (www.nationalcenter.org).